In order to solve the problems of inaccurate dense target recognition and difficult detection of small targets in bird recognition, a bird recognition algorithm based on improved YOLOv8 was proposed. Firstly, in order to solve the problem of difficult dense object recognition, the multi-scale linear attention mechanism EfficientViT was used to replace the backbone network to realize the global receptive field and multi-scale learning, improve the performance and efficiency of the model, and improve the dense object recognition effect. Then, in order to solve the problem that it is difficult to detect small target birds and is prone to missed detection, an efficient multi-scale attention EMA (efficient multi-scale attention) mechanism was introduced to realize cross-dimensional aggregation features through channel recombination, so as to better capture global information, realize multi-scale feature fusion, and reduce the probability of missed detection. The experimental results show that the mAP50 of the improved model on the benchmark dataset CUB-200-2011 and birds28 reaches 77.1% and 88.4%, respectively, which is 4.5 and 5.4 percentage points higher than the original YOLOv8 model, respectively, which verifies the effectiveness of the improved model.